To: Smell

From: A Fair-Weather Friend

Re: So Long For Now

11 • 29 • 05

Dear Smell:

Well, it's here again: the season when we agree to spend more time apart, take a little breathing room, think things over. I know you don't disappear altogether as the temperature drops but you do hang around less, and in a way I welcome this period of separation. Please don't imagine, though, that the relief I feel at your departure is uncomplicated.

This year before you go I want to tell you that I admire you, smell, and I like you. Sure, you aren't as practical as sight and hearing. And you don't beckon us toward the round velvet bed of hedonism in quite the way taste and touch do. You have some charming moments but you certainly don't pander. For every whiff of baking bread or baby scalp you offer, you pelt us with a lot of garbage, truck exhaust, sweat, toner, mould, gas, halitosis, hockey bags, compost, roofing tar, basement must, and bad fish. But if being helpful, seductive, or agreeable all the time were a prerequisite to being loved, you're not the only one who would be in trouble.

I happen to like your aloofness and your cantankerousness. And I think your flair for mischief gives you a certain waggish charm. You know we need air, and you seem to delight in making us work for it. Like your sister sense, taste, you are a gatekeeper of our very survival: if we want to breathe and eat without tracheotomies and IV bags, we have to deal with you two. But taste is much more cooperative than you are. For one thing, we can close our mouths. Except in unusual cases (dental plaque and Buckley's Mixture come to mind), we can pretty much decide what will end up in there. And if nothing worthy of ingestion were to appear for a day or two, we would suffer but we would survive.

Not so with you. You, smell, demand constant access to our insides. Our nostrils, like our ears, gape sluttishly. The most pulmonarily gifted among us can avoid breath (and therefore you) for little more than eight minutes. The rest of us cannot even hope for that brief respite. You follow us wherever we go: there is city stink and country stink, indoor stink and outdoor stink, our own stink and the stink of the reviled other. (Hell really is other people--especially on public transit.) You fill us with the world's reeking until we can stand it no more and then--every so often, just to remind us what else you're capable of: rosemary; coffee; cedar newly cut.

This is naked mockery, smell, and don't think we don't know it. We put up with you in order to get oxygen to our brains and, secondarily, because you offer a crude early-warning signal against approaching fire. But as it turns out, we also seem to rely on you in subtler ways we don't fully understand. Anosmia, the inability to smell, has been known to produce loss of appetite, depression, and to serve as an early sign of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Male mice whose capacity for olfaction has been genetically removed show no will to mate.

You are quiet but you do wield a strange power over us. And with your huge carpet bag of poop and your tiny glass dropper of Chanel No. 5, you might justly be charged with exercising that power like a petulant teenaged aristocrat. I can only imagine the amusement you have derived from our efforts at resistance. You have observed for years as we have tried pitifully to contest your power. The arsenal we've amassed against things that smell bad? Toxic lemon cleansers; floral aerosol sprays; bubble gum-scented hand soap; coconut car fresheners. I imagine you watching, bemused and a little incredulous, as we manufacture overpowering imitations of things that only smell good when they barely smell. How risible our pungent concoctions; how rash and ignorant we must appear, like an enraged drunk running headlong at a lamppost that has nudged past him too aggressively.

Oh, we rail against insult (especially when it's leveled by our own bodies) and we don't always suffer your yoke gladly. We must admit, though, despite our resentment, that like a teacher who is sometimes unjust but always passionate, you affect us. And when it's all over, you may be the one we remember most. Thinking back, for example, to my first day of school, I remember no sounds, no tactile sensations, no tastes (I wasn't a paste-eater). I remember a few patchy images but could at this moment behold school-issue scissors and a ceiling-border alphabet with no emotional effect. But oh, smell, give me an odour: two parts plastic thermos, one part hallway disinfectant, one part chalk dust, and a hint of leftover summer, and I guarantee you tears of visceral recognition.

Summer (even the leftovers) is well behind us now. Winter is here: your most reticent season. The cold has stayed the stray molecules with which you tease and torment us in fairer weather. You will show up from time to time in the coming months, but for the most part your rogue armies of stench will be prevented from wandering the streets making trouble for good citizens.

I admit that I've already begun to miss you--even your raunchier side. In a world of customization, where our pre-selected playlists too often block out the music of those playing real good for free, you remain a ubiquitous, unruly, unavoidable presence that we all must live in and with, together. Smell, behold your comrade hearing--enslaved!--and promise me that you will continue to roam free and wild, never allowing yourself to be confined in some iSmell database.

I may be wrong, but I have begun to suspect that you might have already offered such a promise. Recently, a sweet smell of mysterious origin pervaded New York City. I would like to believe that this was an autumn message of farewell from you to us. I would also like to believe that it was a gesture of benevolent defiance, a promise that you will be back in the spring--next spring and every spring--despite our protestations, despite our congenital aversion to your stock in trade: the unforeseen, the unchosen, the unpleasant. That kind of stunt would have been just your style: to stink relentlessly and without pity all summer until we had nearly given up hope and then, without warning, to waft through a city of eight million people on a jaunty maple breeze, waving cheerfully as though you had never in your life heard the word decay and reminding us, with a wink, that you'll find us again when the snow melts.

Until then,

A Fair-Weather Friend